BETHANY COLLEGE HOSTS ANTI-CATHOLIC PLAY

Catalyst June Issue 1997, Front Page

Bethany College, a Disciples of Christ institution located near Wheeling, West Virginia, recently hosted Agnes of God, a notoriously anti-Catholic play turned movie. The play was performed May 7 to May 10 on the Bethany campus. It was the senior project of a female student in the department of fine arts. Faculty members supervised the project and the completed work will be filed in the college library archives.

The Catholic League expressed its outrage to the president of the university and to the media in the Wheeling area. Here is the text of those remarks:

“It is always distressing to learn about anti-Catholicism on our nation’s campuses. But it is particularly disturbing to learn that a Christian college would actually sponsor bigotry against the Catholic Church.Agnes of God, which was released as a movie in 1985, has been branded as anti-Catholic by Hollywood critic Michael Medved. Movie critic Roger Ebert told his audience that the psychiatrist in the movie, played by Jane Fonda, ‘has a personal hatred of the Catholic Church.’

“The student who chose this movie, and the faculty who found it acceptable, obviously could have selected a script that was not offensive to Catholics. But, instead, they chose to do a play about a nun who murders her baby in the convent and flushes it down the toilet. This is a sad commentary on their thinking and it is an embarrassing statement about the Christian status of this Christian college.”